Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology

Heitman, Danny, The Christian Science Monitor

American naturalist Aldo Leopold is best known for "A Sand County
Almanac," a book that achieved a success Leopold didn't live to
enjoy. Oxford University Press accepted the collection of nature
essays in April of 1948, but Leopold died unexpectedly of a heart
attack a week later while helping put out a grass fire on his
neighbor's rural Wisconsin farm.

Based on Leopold's experiences restoring his own Wisconsin farm
to ecological health, "A Sand County Almanac" has sold more than 2
million copies in 10 languages. In one of the more affecting scenes
in "Green Fire," a 2011 documentary about Leopold's life, the
author's fans can be seen clutching worn paperback editions of his
master work. The tattered volumes suggest that many of Leopold's
admirers take his prose along with them on hikes and camping trips,
enjoying his reflections on the outdoors under the open sky that
Leopold claimed as his private cathedral.

The Library of America's new edition Aldo Leopold: A Sand County
Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology is a beautiful
book, as all LOA editions are, but one can't easily imagine throwing
it in a knapsack. The book follows the LOA tradition of exquisite
binding and acid-free paper, with a ribbon bookmark stitched into
the spine, and the reader feels as if he's holding a church hymnal.
I felt the same way about reading this new Library of America
version of Leopold as I did when I got the LOA's Henry David Thoreau
collection. There's pleasure, of course, in seeing an American
literary original inducted into the LOA's canon - the closest thing
in our national culture to a literary hall of fame. But there's a
fear, too, that any personality bound up in the LOA's reverentially
executed series will seem embalmed.

It's a concern that LOA's staff appeared to anticipate in the
design of this new book, which forgoes the signature black LOA dust
jacket - its in-house equivalent of a sensible shoe - in favor of a
cover brightened by a photograph of ducks flying across an azure
lake. A red, white, and blue ribbon underlines Leopold's name on the
cover - a not-so-subtle reminder that Leopold's brand of patriotism
had a love of the North American landscape at its center.

Born in Burlington, Iowa in 1887, Leopold expressed an early and
prescient concern about the implications of development on the
national ecology. As one of the first agents for the fledgling US
Forest Service, he served in the Southwest, where he joined in the
widespread slaughter of wolves that were considered pests. But after
shooting into a wolf pack and killing the mother of the den, Leopold
had an epiphany, concluding that such ham-fisted efforts to shape
the natural world to man's immediate needs would reap disastrous
consequences. That change of heart, documented in a chapter of the
"A Sand County Almanac" called "Thinking Like A Mountain," has a
distinctly mystical air: "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a
fierce green fire dying in her eyes. …

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